Most of us don’t realize that we have a few central narratives running through our lives because the stories we tell ourselves are so familiar that we don’t even realize they are stories. In my work with clients, I’ve found that it’s often not the events of life that allow or prevent success in love, work, and happiness. It’s the stories we tell ourselves — and we can change our stories.

In their new book, Smart Strengths, positive psychologists and educators John Yeager, Sherri Fisher, and Dave Shearon offer a framework for helping students use their strengths. This book takes fresh research and boils it down into practical, ready-to-apply processes. I know that educators and parents will want to read it and keep it on hand as a valuable resource to return to many times over the years.

Love. Joy. Appreciation. Gratitude. Awe. Until Martin Seligman and his colleagues began documenting the value of these emotions not only to our spirits but to our productivity and well-being, these words were primarily found in religious contexts. With his new book, Flourish, Martin Seligman brings our attention to the compelling evidence that has emerged from the field of Positive Psychology, a field he forged.

When my daughter, Lauren, chose her college, she picked-up on an aspect that didn’t jump out at me. I guess I was the only one surprised at how that played-out four years later and it made me curious: how does a college foster a service culture that stands out to a high school student?

Dear Student,
Don’t worry when people tell you it will be hard to find a job. What the doom-and-gloom folks don’t understand is that they have something as contagious as the H1N1 virus– anxiety. Like the flu, they are probably “carriers” without even realizing it. You can innoculate yourself.

Failure does not breed success when it comes to the brain, according to MIT scientist Earl Miller whose study of monkeys is cited in the Boston Globe article of August 3: “Why success may breed …

If your teen is in the bottom 80% of the class, you may have been told – or thought– that she is “an underachiever” (a polite way of saying lazy or dumb). Underachiever compared to what? Compared to the narrowly-defined measures of school performance or compared to the abilities that will help her to thrive in life?

In my opinion, your child is not under-achieving. I think your child is under-appreciated.

It was not an easy decision for his parents to let Blake leave high school and it continues to be a hard choice. They are attacked by critics —most of whom they’ve never met. If the Peebles had taken the expected path and insisted that their son stay in school, no one would be giving them flack – even if their son was bored, depressed or learning less. Many would tell them they were doing the right thing.

When did we start calling kids “self-motivated” if they responded to someone or something outside themselves? Doesn’t the word “self” mean that it comes from the individual himself? Is someone truly self-motivated if they are doing something to get a reward from someone else? Teens who are not top students may appear to be unmotivated when we look only at their school performance.

In a recent study, I found that a child’s gifts may actually be at odds with the way he is expected to learn: the very gifts that will help him in life, hurt him in school. The conflict between teens’ gifts and school demands is a good reason to question whether our approach to education is best for teens. Yet there is an even more fundamental reason to re-think this myth.